Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT)

Approximately 70 percent of adults in the U.S. have encountered a traumatic occurrence at some point in their existence while 20 percent of that population proceed to develop PTSD. Furthermore, an estimated 1 in 13 people of the U.S. (about 8 percent) will develop PTSD. For those who have served or “spent time in war zones,” 30 percent experience PTSD (“What”). Of course the rates of this mental illness varies from war to war, however, “current estimates of PTSD in military personnel who served in Iraq range from 12 percent to 20 percent” and “in Afghanistan between 6 percent and 11 percent” (“What”).

In the field of therapy, there are numerous of therapy available out there for different type of individuals and situations as well. There is one type of therapy that usually contains people and animal, it is animal-assisted therapy is a therapeutic approach that brings animals and individuals with physical and/or emotional needs together to perform the therapy. Animal-assisted therapy tend to be focused on individuals either children or elderly for them to be able to connect with the animal thus feeling comfortable talking with the therapist. Pet therapy works for all ages, whether sick or not (Lanchnit, 2011). Although, this paper, most of the focus is on animal-assisted therapy towards children using dogs.

In today 's society, there is a great deal of research and practice about evidence based practice. Most of this is highly sought upon in the field of psychology, where evidence and decision making is key to accomplishing new ideas of treatments for people who retain psychiatric problems. The meaning of evidence-based practice in psychology is that it involves making very educated and supported decisions based on punctilious, unambiguous, and astute evidence (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). With evidence-based practice, it assists in raising and deriving the issue of what evidence really is, the strength of the evidence, and how practitioners can improve the quality of their evidence (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). Evidence is a major factor because it may either enhance or hinder the practitioner 's ability to make decisions and construct their practices on patients (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). Evidence-based practice began in the 1980 's with the goal to combine the practices of scientific evidence with physician education and clinical practice. The issue with this was that medical schools did not have the ability to teach their own specific approaches to clinical problems (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). As an effect to this cause, three main issues quickly arose about the effectiveness and quality of evidence-based practice. First, since other fields were advancing growth in

Sullivan, Gregory. "Vetting PTSD." Nature Medicine 17.9 (2011): 1031. Health Reference Center Academic. Web. 21 Apr.

PTSD among combat veterans can be very complex for it has many different variables that can play a part in the severity and duration. The different variables can be found in prewar, warzone, and

Media leakage have soared questioning the height of military veteran abuses requiring CO to assess ways to reduce the national embarrassment and media coverage of disclosing such information to the public (Soriano, 2013). Therefore, the purpose of the PTSD assessment is to focus on developing realistic and doable research to evaluate the veteran’s mental health status for possible substance abuse or potential domestic violence cases (Soriano, 2013). The possible PTSD symptoms among pre-discharge military personnel’s need to examine and evaluate using the mix-method methodology to satisfying stakeholders that are the spouses, children, media, and organizations (Creswell, 2009; Soriano, 2013). The goal is to conduct several required assessments that will help CO to determine which discharge personnel’s exhibit signs and symptoms of PTSD. Considering the mental health status and substance abuse to provide preventative social services needed protect the veterans and their loved ones call serious attention (Soriano,

Evidence points to CPT’s efficacy as a psychological treatment for PTSD and has demonstrated potential to decrease symptoms of depression and guilt. Although more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of CPT with various populations, both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs are recommending CPT as an evidence-based treatment for PTSD. A major benefit of CPT the gains are noticeable in a very short period. The rapid response to treatment is particularly important to military and active-duty populations for whom time may be limited (Keane TM, Marshall AD, Taft

I will be collaborating with The National Institute of Mental Health for the funding of the research project. The research will attempt to identify what factors determine whether someone with PTSD will respond well to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) intervention, aiming to develop more personalized, effective and efficient treatments. The mission of this project is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure (National Institutes of Health, 2013).

Participants will be collected different PTSD clinics to avoid biases. Patients will be collected in groups each at a time.

In an article published by Time magazine, they stated “40,000 troops have been physically wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, but 10 times as many exhibit symptoms of PTSD.” This means four-hundred thousand troops are still suffering from these symptoms. In the Time article, it talks about how scientists learned that dogs can lower these symptoms in veterans. These scientist have proven this by using many individuals cases and comparing the intensity of their symptoms without therapy dogs to the patients with therapy dogs. Although many people believe dogs cannot lower symptoms of disorders, scientists like those interviewed for the Time article are proving them wrong. Therapy dogs positively affect war veterans by lowering their Post Traumatic

This article summarizes how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) effects soldiers returning from combat zones and how service dogs help relieve PTSD symptoms. After the success of an award-winning program created for at risk teens, Rick Yount, a social worker and certified service dog trainer, created the first Warrior dog-training program. The Warrior dog-training program was designed to be a safe and effective

This annotated bibliography looked at 6 different journal articles on the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) versus other methods and variations of CBT. Historically speaking, it is common knowledge in the field of psychology for CBT to have a 50% success rate for patients with PTSD in that it either works or it doesn’t work, which is traceable to the patients commitment to the therapy. These articles review abstract ideas that have been ventured upon by researchers to corroborate the preconceived notions of CBT and PTSD and find a

Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that may develop after experiencing or seeing a traumatic or a brutal life threatening event. It is increasingly on the rise in war veterans. For those with PTSD only 53 percent have seen physicians or a mental health care provider. And for those who sought out care, roughly only 50 percent received adequate treatment when returning from combat. Although there are many treatments available most patients disregard the obvious signs of PTSD. Because some are afraid of the stigma of PTSD and being labeled as a crazy or violent person, If we create awareness and stop this ignorant notion, people with the disorder would

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is described as “a psychiatric disorder that results from the experience or witnessing of traumatic or life-threatening events (“Evidence Based PTSD,” 2005). PTSD has come to light a great deal as of late because of the troops returning home from the two war fronts that United States are currently fighting on. Today’s soldiers return home with not just physical scars, but return home with severe emotional scars as well. It’s important while conducting research into such an issue like PTSD that it’s done in a fashion that does not upset or overly excite the patient in the study. Patients or people with PTSD can be very anxious, angry, on edge, and sometimes closed and not too personal. In order to understand how to run a study on such an illness, it is important that you understand what would be considered unethical and ultimately who can be harmed from the study.

If veterans do struggle with PTSD after they return from combat the Department of Veterans Affairs, a governmental agency that helps struggling veterans recover, offers two treatments. Studies have been done to see if one of the therapies is more effective than the other. There is not yet evidence that one therapy is better than the other. Cognitive processing therapy, CPT, helps by giving the vet a new way to deal with the maladaptive thoughts that come with PTSD. It also comforts them in gaining a new understanding of the traumatic events that happened to them. One of the other benefits of CPT is that it assists the person in learning how these disturbing events change the way they look at everything in life and helps them cope with that (“PTSD: National”). The second newer option of the two is prolonged exposure therapy, which is repeated exposure to these thoughts, feelings, and situations (“Most PTSD”). This type of therapy is now a central piece in the VA’s war on PTSD. “The problem with prolonged exposure is that it also has made a number of veterans violent, suicidal, and depressed, and it has a dropout rate that some researchers put at more than 50 percent, the highest dropout rate of any PTSD therapy that has been widely studied so far,”(“Trauma Post”). Both of the therapies are proven to reduce the symptoms but both have extremely high drop out rates and low follow through. It